Friday, 23 June 2023

Book ~ "Blind Date" (2022) Brenda Chapman

From Goodreads ~ Nobody’s safe when a killer has you in their sights.

True crime podcaster Ella Tate is shaken to her core by the horrific assault and murder of Josie Wheatly, a teacher she has never met ... because not only had Josie moved into Ella’s vacated apartment three months earlier but her Facebook photos reveal a striking resemblance between the two women.

Within days, two people close to Ella are harmed and she fears that she’s become the target of twisted revenge from her crime-reporting days. Reluctantly teaming up with her neighbour, Tony, a hairdresser who loves the finer things in life, and Liam Hunter, the persistent detective assigned to the cases, Ella struggles to stay one step ahead before she becomes the target of the final kill.

Ella recently got laid off from her job as a newspaper reporter and has started a crime podcast. She and her live-in boyfriend recently broke up, taking all of his furniture with him. She's barely scraping by now. She doesn't have many people close to her except her younger brother, Danny, who is a busker addicted to drugs and living on the streets, Finn, her childhood friend, and O'Brien, a police officer she has known for about ten years.

Ella starts to investigate the rape and suicide of a teacher named Josie, who had recently moved into Ella's old apartment. Ella realizes how similar they are in appearance and wonders if she was the intended victim. As she starts digging, she receives threats and terrible things start happening to people around her.

This is the first of two in the Hunter and Tate series (I'd read the second one in March) and I liked it ... there are lots of possibilities about who could have done everything. It's written in third person perspective in various voices depending on where the action was. I like the fact that it is set in Ottawa, ON, and they didn't hide it. As a head's up, there is swearing and violence.

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